China’s most popular blogger, Han Han (with a delicious Controversies section on Wikipedia, if you like that kind of thing), is described below “as if Stephenie Meyer, the teen-vampire author, had abandoned the Twilight series and started directing fans’ attention to the misuse of public funds”
The Web had altered the course of Han Han’s life. When he was in tenth grade, in 1998, he failed seven courses and dropped out. The next year, he sent a handwritten manuscript to a publisher; it was a novel called Triple Door, about a Chinese high school student slogging through “hours of endless emptiness,” copying lessons “from the blackboard to the notebook to the exam,” while his mother fed him pills intended to boost his IQ. Han compared China’s school system to the manufacture of chopsticks—a system designed to yield products of “exactly the same length.” Another publisher had pronounced the novel gloomy and out of step with the times; successful books about Chinese youth were more often akin to Harvard Girl, with the ambitious Ivy Leaguer clenching ice cubes to build fortitude. But an editor was enthusiastic about Han’s novel and printed thirty thousand copies. They sold out in three days. Another thirty thousand copies were printed, and they sold out, too.
In the global canon of teen-angst literature, the novel was tame, but in China it was unprecedented: a scathingly realistic satire of education and authority, written by a nobody. State television moved to tamp down the frenzy with an hour-long discussion on its national broadcast, but the strategy backfired. On TV, Han Han projected insolent glamour, with a boy-band shag haircut that swept down and across his left eye. When educators in tweeds and ties fulminated against “rebelliousness” that “might contribute to social instability,” Han smiled, cut them off, and said, “From the sound of it, your life experience has been even shallower than mine.” He was instantly famous—a seductive spokesman for a new brand of youthful defiance. The Chinese press proclaimed “Han Han fever.”
Triple Door went on to sell more than two million copies, putting it among China’s bestselling novels of the past two decades. In the next several years, Han published four more novels and several essay collections faithful to the subjects he knew best: teenagers, girls, and cars.
In 2006, Han Han started blogging, and his focus took an unmistakable turn toward some of China’s most sensitive matters: party corruption, censorship, the exploitation of young workers, pollution, the gap between the rich and the poor. It was as if Stephenie Meyer, the teen-vampire author, had abandoned the Twilight series and started directing fans’ attention to the misuse of public funds.
His criticism placed him in frequent combat with the “angry youth.” When Tang Jie and his friends were circulating nationalist videos in the spring of 2008, Han Han wrote, “How can our national self-respect be so fragile and shallow?… Somebody says you’re a mob, so you curse him, attack him, and then you say, ‘We’re not a mob.’ This is as if someone says you’re a fool, so you hold up a big sign in front of his girlfriend’s brother’s dog saying ‘I Am Not a Fool.’ The message will get to him, but he’ll still think you’re a fool.” A pro-government website once listed Han Han among the “slaves of the West” and superimposed a noose on his picture.
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